l&h blog

How have you spent lockdown? l&h composer Stephen Hyde has been busy preparing the GUY soundtrack for its Spotify release... and realised that there's a lot more to it than meets the ear.

It’s only when I tried to 'master' the GUY recordings that I realised that verb actually meant something.

It would be easy to think to put out a recording on Spotify, all you have to do is meet the singers, hit record, have a cuppa tea and post it to Spotify.

Oh no.

​Turns out all sorts of other scary verbs take place along the way: “mixing”, “side-chaining”, “EQ’ing”… “bouncing”. Oh yes, these songs will have been bounced. I don’t wish to refer to me and Leo’s work as squidgy balls, but the amount of times I’ve had to bounce them, they may as well be.

Oh and they’ve been automated too. Each “track” is made up of lots of little tracks - so you might have “lead vocal”, “lead synth”, “bongo drum”, “kazoo” - and they all go together to make up the overall song. I’m a bit of a glutton for tracks. Don’t ask me how, but Click has 97 of them!

For each one you can “automate” different things like volume, reverb, cutoff - which may sound totally boring BUT you do get to construct pretty little houses made of yellow stilts (see picture above). And then, when you’re happy everything is automated, side-chained, EQ’d, cut off, filtered, limited, reverberated and spliced, you finally get to the BOUNCING. Anti-climax: that’s basically when all those little tracks are made into one little neat audio file. (Then you listen to it, realise synth no 6 has too much reverb and bongo no 10 hasn’t been side-chained… and you repeat.)

Who knew making an EP could be so fiddly?!

Click comes out on May 25th. The GUY EP comes out on June 5th.

TOP TIPS

Are you thinking of releasing your own music? Here are three things we've learnt along the way:

1. Recording - Get yourself a good mic... Quality counts! (We use a Rode condenser)2. Preparing - Get yourself a trusty DAW (Digital audio workstation): it will be your best friend. (We use Logic Pro X - it can do so many things, it's the gift that keeps on giving!)3. Releasing - To self-release onto Spotify, you need to do it through a distributor. (We use Ditto! They're a huge international thing, but we love 'em cos they began and are based in Liverpool!)